Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Major issue: Characters being forced out of turn-based mode without the game telling you

Picture this: 20 minutes spent setting up the perfect ambush. Every character is in position. They've oiled their weapons, concentrated on their spells, drunk their potions. The game is in turn-based mode of course, so that all the 10-turn timers don't start ticking down while the rest are being set up.

Finally it's time to spring the trap. Astarion makes the first strike. The enemies don't know what hit them.

But wait, what's this? Only Astarion is in combat, along with the dozen enemies. Suddenly they all start taking their turns against him. No matter, I'll just switch to Shadowheart for the healing and follow-up attack... oh wait, everyone but Astarion is no longer in turn-based mode and all their buffs are at half their remaining time already. Meanwhile Astarion is dead because the enemies freely take their turns before I can get my other characters into the action.

This also happens if there's a cutscene before a boss fight. A lot of the time, not every character will be part of the conversation, and while I talk to the big baddie, everyone else's buffs run out. This leads to the supremely immersion-breaking conclusion that I have to skip the cutscene to optimize my gameplay.

This is a turn-based game, so why does it so often feel like I have to frantically press buttons in real time? Basically...

1: Why do other party members get forced out of turn-based mode when a cutscene or battle starts for one character? Why doesn't the game even warn me about this?

2: Why can't I pause the action during combat so I can get the rest of my party into the battle if only one character accidentally got into combat, before that one character gets ganged up on and killed? It should be possible to advance enemy turns one by one.

3: Why do characters some distance away keep acting in real time during turn-based mode? Sometimes an ally is being killed and I have to rescue them, but going into turn-based mode only slows ME down while enemies just keep killing the ally in real time. This is very stressful.


I love this game but there's so much of the design that really seems to hate the player. Or do most people just not mind the way it is?

Peeps have been harping on this one for a while. There's a megathread like 100 pages long from EA, with much grumbling about ambushes and the how group/ungroup function works in BG3.

A similar example would be when Non-Hostiles or whatever 3rd faction will drop out of initiative, even when directly attacked, if say some guard observes, and then the neutrals will all start auto-healing with no way to stop the clock on that.

Another situation would be like when the player re-groups after pre-positioning or pre-buffing at the very last second, in the hopes that everyone will get pulled into initiative at the same time, say for a boss fight, but half the time that doesn't work either. Or again, being unable to halt the stopwatch in order to cancel AoE concentration spells before all the other characters start running towards the selected character and taking damage right as combat concludes.

Solution would have been some sort of Auto-pause/Auto-save for the active party, when combat begins, and then again when combat concludes. If the game would just remain in turn based mode instead of dropping out of initiative the second the last enemy falls, that would have solved many headaches/reloads.

I agree that the knock on effect of all this is to encourage players to skip cutscenes as rapidly as possible, because the clock will still be ticking during those dialogues.

There are lots of combats triggered by conversations, or conversations that trigger when a combat is resolved, and the jump from TB to back to Real-Time is super awkward. For buffs with a limited duration, say something like Haste that only works for a couple rounds, by the time some NPC finishes talking, you're probably already dazed. Spacebar slamming can also result in undesirable convo choices, since spacebar is both the confirm dialog choice and the skip. I think it would have worked just as well as the way we enter/exit Turn Based mode or a pause. There are many situations where it feels like the game just can't provide a real sense of danger/threat to the players without resorting to stuff like this, which seems unfortunate. What I mean is that, if the only way I can get the Characters to trigger traps, or make accidents happen on the fly, is by forcing the characters to amble around recklessly outside of initiative or with wonky formations/pathing, I feel like that's a miss. My solution lately has just been to avoid using the Ungroup feature altogether, and trying to always have the party enter initiative together, but then you can still run into situations where a character is in Stealth and throws a wrench in that.

There are mods to adjust the initiative from D4 to D20, for feats like Alert and such, which I think might make ambushes more interesting, but it doesn't really get at the underlying problem, which is that the game lacks any sort of global pause. Even bringing up the main menu or save game screen won't stop the clock. It's pretty oddball. I think what I would want is maybe some sort of ambush phase/round that could get a similar sort of flavor to the ungroup pre-buff/position, but I don't know. it works if you're like an assassin running solo and always gaming in and out of initiative by yourself, but breaks down at the level of the full party. I feel like being grouped or linked into groups of 1-3, 2-2, 3-1 might be a way to tell the game who should be linked together in time. Not sure though, it seems like an MP thing that crept into the SP game, but I don't know that it really works the way I want in either case hehe. There have been modest improvements along the way, stuff ironed out, but the main kinks sorta remain. For me at least. It's only panic inducing sometimes hehe

ps. for me Necromite spawns were also pretty buggy. But yeah the scariest is when it's NPCs that need to be rescued! Poor Rolan, the shadows were too fast! lol

Yeah, that is the biggest disadvantage of TB compared to RTwP. Especially as a caster, you want to cast offensive spells, but you can't because you couldn't precast your defensive spells beforehand or the duration has expired, as you guys described.

I'm reminded of this every time I fight, for the first time with terrain advantage positioning, the harypies. One character is in combat, the others are not. The others run in and join the fight, but can't perform any actions. Annoying...

First round caster is not in combat... Secound round casters joins in by movement, but has no more action... Third round caster misses with his attack (and there is just one attack, without haste)... I had to learn early to always be in range to cast spells, if I doesn't want to waste a turn... So with bad luck by these TB mechanics you loose 3 turns... At least two...

I don’t think it’s Turn-based problem, it’s Larian problem. Their implementation is bizarre to me, and their previous game had some of the same issues. At best, it comes down to their games acting like a multiplayer game even when one plays by himself, but some decisions are beyond me - like why combat is initiated per character, if they are all in the vicinity. I think it feels terrible in singleplayer and multiplayer.

Alas regular complaints during EA weren’t enough for L. to reonsider the design.

I remember some of the articles posted in the press even before EA was released. The possibility to have your party members roam different parts of the world independently was presented as a feature of great potential. Now in reality that potential didn't materialize. I don't think many players have split the party up and have them explore different areas at the same time. But it is a feature they put in the game and turns out to have only disadvantages.

I agree with you there. I addressed an even more annoying problem with TB back in the old megathread, regardless of whether it's TB in general or Larian's implementation: But you can't do simultaneous attacks, which I also really, really miss.

This one can be a nightmare vortex of related bad mechanics happening at once.

One time I was fighting a battle where I had a group of allied NPCs on my side, and when the battle finished, I was immediately pulled into a cutscene where they were going to reward me for aiding them. During the cutscene, the allies (presumably) ran through one of my lingering AoE concentration spells, and suddenly I was kicked out of the cutscene and into combat against my allies! I didn't even have a chance to end concentration on the spell, because it was the NPCs that defeated the last enemies and ended the battle.

It often feels like I have to frantically switch perspectives and attempt to activate turn based mode in case something goes wrong when I'm not watching. Even activating traps sometimes doesn't put you into turn-based mode, and then if you're not fast enough on the turn-based button you'll take more fire/poison damage or whatever the trap does. The game struggles against its own turn-based design.

I found it happen quite a bit during my coop D:OS times - one player would end up shopping for longer, while the other would start exploring - if the 2nd player run into combat encounter, 1st player could join him at his own leasure.

I don't think EVERY creature and player on the map should enter turn based mode when a combat encounter happens, but surely, it must be possible to design a system where characters within the close vicinity are pulled in as soon as combat starts.

I did speculate back during EA, if perhaps it is lack of some awerness mechanics that stops Larian from going that route - for example, during harpy fight in act1, it is possible to draw quite a few NPCs from the grove is the battle spreads too close to the beach exit. It is not impossible, that if the game would start draw in character within a radious it could have a domino effect without additional system to govern who is aware that the combat starts. Still, it is something I hoped Larian would figure those things out, third time around.


Yeah, ambushing is broken in both ways - it can be really abused, but it can also screw you over. It's something that could be made more intuitive and better balanced, if initiating combat would just... initiate combat, rather than putting characters in different dimentions. I remember some annoying encounters in D:OS2 where stealthed enemies continue to move in real time after the combat started, and burn through party HP by backstabbing them and entering combat afterwards, before I was able to figure out what's going on. At least I don't remember that happening in BG3.